The Sinister Moose

I have, for many years now, been an active web designer and hosting provider for about 250 to 300 websites. I have been concentrating mostly on Joomla, the system this website runs, and many other PHP Content Management Systems.

One of my clients who we'll call Bob's House of Beef, has recently decided to move to another website designer because they are unhappy with their google search rankings. However, there is a twist with this problem, that I, as an ethical white hat wearing designer and host, cannot let pass with out ranting a little about it.

Bob's House of Beef, sells beef as one might expect, and if you search for Beef and Bob, they are ranked #1 across all the websites. However, they are not happy about this. They effectively want to be ranked #1 if someone searches for pork, poultry, and used tires.

I've tried the very simple explanation of: If you're Pepsi, you cannot use keywords like Coke or coca cola in your meta tags, or Google will flag you and drop your site like a hot potato. Unfortunately Bob's House of Beef has been talking to a "SEO Optimization Master" who has fed them a line of shit about guaranteed high rankings for what ever they want to use as keywords, even if it's not a product they sell.

My initial reaction was that this SEO Guru, is selling them Google Ad Space to insure their site would be at the top, but according to them this is not the case. This same SEO Guru said that by manipulating the site directly they can pull "force" the rankings to climb higher even for things that Bob's House of Beef doesn't sell or do.

Oh  Really?

I have agreed to turn over control of Bob's House of Beef to this SEO asshat, and see just how long it will take before Google bans their obviously "black hat" techniques.

I'm not saying that SEO as an industry is dead, it's simply a moving target. Google can tweak an algorithm and months of work can be trashed because the target has changed. There is a need for SEO, and many websites could benefit from careful use of "White Hat" SEO techniques, which would improve rankings and relavance.  However relavance is the point which I have tried unsuccessfully to convince this client of.

The domain name is only mildly important. If properly built and optimized I can bring the ranking up on searches for "purple narthok penis implants" on a domain like greenmonkeytoe.com, so while having a domain name that matches the search phrase helps, it's not critical, and often not worth the extra investment in registering that specific domain.

However, if your site is full of pages of information about "purple narthok penis implants", I cannot, using white hat seo techniques, force that site rank high on searches for "ever lasting boobie flanges". It's just not happening.

So, I am offering to do the only thing I think is reasonable. I have made a complete backup of Bob's House of Beef's website, and now I'll wait. I'll wait for the inevitable call from the owner over at Bob's who will no doubt bitch and moan about not being able to find his site using Google after the SEO Guru screwed with it.

To all the legitimate SEO Optimizers who would look at this situation and say, "Sorry, what you're asking for won't work." I would like to say thank you.

To all the SEO Gurus who use Gray or even Black hat SEO techniques, I have to say, SUCK IT!

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